What will certainly in the future become legend: my attempt to capture true adventure - the drama, pain, and hilarity of our largely unplanned six-month trip across the country. It's like reality TV, except you're going to read it!

Crossing into Cajun Land

Our last night in Texas was spent in Webster. Right outside of town, I saw an abandoned gas station, which hadn’t been used in years. The red-and-yellow sign in front of the station, crooked due to the passage of time, proclaimed that regular gas was eighty-nine cents per gallon. When businesses and houses die around here, they just sit there, abandoned and ignored, left to eternity and gravity. Bill’s bike had gotten crunched (perhaps when it was mounted on the back of the Suburban and a particularly sharp U-turn had been executed) and so we brought it to Webster Bicycle, on NASA rd 1, (NASA road…leads to Houston) where the goateed bike guy ‘banged it out with a hammer’ and charged us twenty-seven bucks. Bill set out riding from Webster on Saturday, March 24, and when Sarah and I picked him up (at a gas station that was selling Slim Jims that had expiration dates of 2002) right outside South Houston, I asked him where we were heading to that day. “You know what?” Bill said, “I think it’s time to get out of Texas. Let’s go to Louisiana.” And so we went, rattling in the Suburban east on I-10. I was driving that day, and they were doing work on the roads so they were narrower than usual, and there were enormous semi trucks next to me on the two-lane road, towering above me and weaving, cruising at 70-80 mph…and it was a bit scary. However, I did not crash the second trailer. Yet.

Our first night in ‘The Bayou State’ was spent in Sulphur, Louisiana, a small city named after the chemical and mining plants that were established here in the 1800s. Not too much to do in Sulphur, and not many places to eat…just a Waffle House within walking distance. I never saw a Waffle House until east Texas, but it’s a chain out here…they only accept cash, and they say they are ‘a step above’ McDonald’s. They boast synthetic-wooden booths and laminated menus that serve as placemats. The menu includes burgers and soup and waffles and pork chops, and everything is accompanied by a healthy scoop of undercooked, mass-produced potato strips that masquerade as hash browns. The only cheese option a consumer has at the Waffle House are slices of super-processed, super-yellow American cheese. However, we bonded with the two employees working there: a waitress and a waiter, but the waiter was acting as the cook because the real cook had called in sick, and is a crystal meth addict, and the owner was reluctant to fire him because if he got fired, he’d be put back in jail. So I’m glad it was the waiter that was my cook. Even if the hash browns were undercooked slimy thin potato strips. They gave us a discount. And the chili was damn good.

Louisiana is very pretty, from what we’ve seen so far. The weather is nice, (the locals say it gets really humid starting soon, though) the countryside is green and swampy, filled with bayous (‘bayou’ is a French word which means ‘slow-moving river’); mirrors of water lining the roads and reflecting the sky, with lots of white birds strutting around. The trees are tall...it's a nice place…although there has been a stray mosquito or two appearing (I got three bites: one on my foot and two on my leg, from one sucker who sketched its way into our hotel room). And so I think Louisiana is lovely…

...until we drove down to the coast and started to see remnants of the hurricanes. We were staying about 45 minutes north of the Gulf coastline, which looked relatively undamaged, but Bill wanted to ride south on Route 27 from Sulphur to Holly Beach, a coastal town. Sarah and I began to drive south, and didn’t see any wreckage for a while, until I noticed some trash on the side of the road, random debris that looked like plastic bags and building materials. Then there were some wooden docks that were all ripped and twisted in slatted spirals over the swamplands, and then we saw a church that had had its roof ripped off. After that was Holly Beach, and when we arrived at this seaside town that had once certainly been beautiful…there was nothing there. Just piles and piles of twisted metal and unrecognizable flotsam. The first time we saw a truck lying crushed and half-submerged in a swamp we were shocked...until we realized that there were vehicles and four-wheelers overturned, crunched, destroyed, and thrown everywhere. There were wheelchairs and refrigerators and toilets and microwaves and baby strollers thrown on the sides of the road in all sorts of grotesque twisted positions, an intermingling of ruined material. There were square cement foundations of houses footprinted into the dirt, with no walls, no roofs, nothing else left except trash scattered everywhere. Houses that did have some sort of intact wall were spray-painted with the orange X that indicated the date, address of the house, the organization that checked the house, and the bottom quadrant of the X symbolizes the number of bodies found in the house. Lots of them had GOD BLESS sprayed on too. Huge boats lay torn apart, sucked out of the water by horrible omnipotent winds and cast on the ground. Gas station pumps lay dislodged and sideways in contortions of metal. I noticed one house that had a galvanized mailbox on a post that survived, nearly vertical still, beside the foundation of the home it had belonged to – but the house and all signs of human life had disappeared. It was eerie; a mailbox but no mail being delivered to it…because there was no house there. American flags and Louisiana flags had been propped up, rare spots of color, flapping above the wasteland. It was a bittersweet display of pride that affected me; caused that twinge of the ‘I could cry right now’ feeling behind my eyes.

I mean, I saw the hurricane aftermath coverage on TV...but to stand there among the devastation and think of the community that had been alive here a year ago...completely destroyed...it broke my heart. The three of us drove in silence. Some people had trailers put up on the lots that they had once had a home on, and the trailers look new and shiny and drastically out of place among the wreckage that represents the loss of the home and the lives that had once thrived there. We saw people out dragging debris into piles, and this is six months after Hurricane Rita hit southwest Louisiana. I felt complete empathy and sadness - and at the same time a fiery rage at our government for not taking better care of this situation. I can't believe that everything is still in such a state down here. I'm pissed. I can't believe what I saw today and I can't help doing what I so often do in my writing and thinking about New Hampshire, and how I would feel if parts of it had been so completely ruined. And my ’93 Taurus is not the exact dream car that I would choose, but how would I feel if I went looking for it after a hurricane and found it smashed, mangled, and abandoned in a maze of metal and fabric, upside-down in a swamp? It isn't something I can even begin to imagine.

The day we went to Holly Beach, March 25, was a very upsetting day for me. It's been cause for a lot of reflection. To actually see what happened down here, to stand among it instead of just seeing it on late-night news while comfy on your $25 Goodwill couch eating Triscuits in New Hampshire, (that was my situation) truly makes a difference in the way you view such a disaster.

On a lighter note, Louisiana is by far the state richest in culture that we’ve encountered. Everything here is ‘Cajun this’ and ‘Creole that’. People are fiercely proud of their French heritage (which is really French-Canadian heritage). Louisiana is the only state with a large population of Cajuns, descendants of the Acadians who were driven out of Canada in the 1700s because they wouldn't pledge allegiance to the King of England. The Cajuns were joined by another group of settlers called Creoles, which were descendants of African, West Indian, and European pioneers. At the time of the migration, Louisiana was under Spanish rule and they welcomed new settlers. Louisiana is also the only state that doesn’t have counties: they call them parishes, which is a holdover from the Spanish religious traditions.

We stayed at the Best Western in Kinder, Louisiana for two nights, which was next to the Coushatta Casino. The casino has a restaurant inside called “Gumbeaux” and Sarah and I had a long conversation with Lauren, our waitress. She’s worked there for a long time, and she worked there during the hurricanes last year, at which point the casino had been closed for two months and paid her the minimum wage, which of course for a Louisiana waitress isn’t too much. (The waiter at the Waffle House was saying he was happy because he was making almost seven bucks an hour. Hmmm…seven bucks an hour…perhaps with that I could buy myself a new Sharpie or something.) She has no intentions of moving away from the area, though, which some people did after the hurricanes, and I heard the pride in her voice when she talked about her state and the culture she loves so much – and I understood why she stays. It’s the love of a region, a love for one’s home. We were talking to her about Mardi Gras and she was saying that the smaller towns in Louisiana have their own ‘real’ Mardi Gras celebrations, which have nothing to do with the New Orleans version of parade floats and the exposing of breasts in exchange for beads. In the smaller towns, Mardi Gras consists of dressing up in wildly colored capes, masks that hide everyone’s identities, and cone-shaped hats, called capuchons, (a French word for ‘hat’). Everyone runs around, gets drunk all day, chases chickens and catches them with their bare hands, and gets whipped by the Capitan (an elected member of the town). Over the course of the day, everyone visits their neighbors and begs for ingredients to make gumbo, and then at night everyone eats the gumbo.

Gumbo brings me to the other thing that stands out about Louisiana: the food.

A standard pizza place in New England (and, not being a gourmet chef, I know this) will offer appetizers such as: mozzarella sticks, breadsticks, buffalo wings, and jalapeno poppers. These things exist in the Cajun land as well; but there are strange otherworldly additions to the menu…appetizer selections here would include:

1. Crawfish (aka crayfish, aka tiny mutant lobsters). Every person we meet here asks if we’ve eaten Louisiana crawfish yet. Fried crawfish tails, boiled crawfish, WHAT crawfish…people keep recommending numerous restaurants to us for delectable crawfish fare. People fish for crawfish on the sides of the road. And tonight… I had a crawfish-topped baked potato at DC’s Steakhouse in Eunice, LA. I finally ate some! The flavor was shrimpy, the meat was red, and the texture was chewy: definitely good.

2. Grilled or fried ‘alligator bites’. Alligator meat is on every menu around here, and you can get it blackened for only $1 more! People say it tastes like chicken. I say…I don’t really think I want to eat alligator.

3. Gumbo. Gumbo is a soup that has a lot of meat in it: chicken, sausage, shrimp, crawfish, pork, oyster, turtle, and any and all combinations thereof. It’s served in one bowl and then a bowl of rice is provided, and you eat the gumbo over the rice. I tried gumbo here as well; chicken and sausage gumbo with broth and a cup of white rice. The people down here are not health-conscious; every eatery functions in a whirlwind of deep-frying activity, the convenience stores don’t sell any milk with a fat percentage less than whole, and all the chicken segments in my gumbo were dark-meat chicken. (Which is a million times more delicious than white meat…but I know it’s bad!)

5. Boudin, or ‘Cajun sausage’: pork mixed with onions, rice and herbs and stuffed back into the sausage casing! I haven’t tried that one yet.

Another endearing thing about life down here is the way people speak: a dialect infused with ‘y’all’s’ and ‘ma’am’s’, a slower form of speech that rolls around your eardrums in a soft comforting way…I love it! I love hearing the Southern drawl…to hear conversations between everyday people that are so normal, but twinged with the accent…it’s great. And I love the reactions when people hear how we speak and we tell them where we’re from: “Neww HAYMP-shire??!! What’re y’all doin down here??!!” It’s precious. And people down here think that we have accents. Now that’s funny.

Bill is up to 1989 miles, and some of the rural Louisiana roads don’t actually have a shoulder, so he’s being All-Terrain Bill right now. And tomorrow we have to find ourselves yet another bike shop…the bike tire didn’t so much get flat as it completely separated from the wheel…and I don’t get it…and so the quest for bike shop #6 will commence in the morning…

And I have enjoyed my exploration of The Bayou State: a lovely, shallow-watered landscape of emerald and sage and forest, with oak and cypress trees forming a shady ceiling over the road…a place partially destroyed but so strong in spirit and fierce in its love of culture…

Comments

Oh dear, Waffle House. You will be able to stop at Waffle Houses until you reach the Mason-Dixon Line. In college we risked many-a-DUI's to go to a 24-hour waffle house in Christiansburg, VA. How sweet it was.

I would like to recommend that Bill and yall go to Gulf Shores, Alabama, and vist the tiny, but VERY interesting albino crayfish museum---not so much for what they have, but if you then go three or so streets due North, and turn left, you will come to one of the finest eating establishments in the entire south.

It's a small hole in the wall place called Miss Billie Bink Bimple's--and without a doubt, she serves the best schlimps you have EVER set into your mougth.